


Pattern Buffer Dreams

by weakinteraction



Category: Marathon (Video Games)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-14 13:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8016589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His body spent seventeen years in a stasis chamber.</p><p>What happened to his mind?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pattern Buffer Dreams

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hokuto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/gifts).



Reality swims out of focus, stretched and compressed on different axes simultaneously, before disappearing completely in a storm of static.

For a single moment that stretches into eternity, everything stops. He is a stream of data being transmitted, not in any way aware; this sense of not-being is just a confabulation by his brain to account for the discontinuity between one moment of consciousness and the next.

And then, time does resume; the teleport snaps him back into another location entirely.

He takes in his new surroundings quickly, glancing from side to side. He is in a small room with a single exit behind him. In front of him is a window, overlooking another, larger room which itself has a window in the far wall. He scans the view through the window even as he instinctively checks that his MA-75 is fully loaded with grenades, but there is no enemy activity down there to be aggressively terminated.

That's when he realises that he can't hear anything: there is no eerie Pfhor chattering anywhere. He's become so used to listening out for it, the IFF map next to useless against their cloaking mechanisms. But then he realises that he _can_ hear other sounds: human sounds. Screaming and crying. But others that he hasn't heard in so long: laughter, the murmured conversations of lovers.

 _What_ are _the Bobs up to?_ As he goes to investigate, he notices the terminal by the exit.

`There are locked doors here, but this time they're not my doing. You'll have to think your own way in.`

_Can't, or won't?_ he thinks. Not that it matters; it's clear that he isn't going to be getting out of here until Durandal's satisfed with his jumping through hoops.

The exit leads into a long featureless corridor; as he walks down it, the unfamiliar sounds -- the sounds of human happiness -- grow louder. Eventually, the corridor emerges into a slightly larger chamber, connected to many others. He begins to explore, the map automatically updating itself as he does so. The twisty maze of passages, lifts and drops reminds him of the deeper workings on the Marathon, where the regularity of spaceship corridors began to give way to the haphazardness of mined-out moon.

He feels a chill, somewhere deep in his marrow. Reminds him of the Marathon? This _is_ the Marathon, isn't it?

He emerges into another long corridor, trailing away into darkness. He proceeds down it cautiously, firing off occasional rounds so that the tracer bullets illuminate the surroundings for a moment. But wherever he is, there appear to be no enemies nearby. The strange sounds he heard earlier while exploring the maze are fading too, and he feels a desire to return, to investigate further. When the end of the corridor proves to be blocked by a huge computer core erupting into the infrastructure almost randomly, he decides to turn back.

As he makes his way back, he checks the map. There appear to be multiple doors in the walls of the maze, though they seem to be at points where there couldn't be anything behind them other than other areas he had already explored. Nor are they marked in the usual way; they shimmer in and out on the HUD, like cloaked enemies. Is that something to do with Durandal's message?

The first of the doors he comes to opens easily, against his expectations. He steps through--

* * *

This transition is _not_ like the teleporter, but something has definitely happened. He walks smoothly through the door, but as he does so he seems to shrink.

"Did you get the new circuits from the store?"

He has walked through the door of his own home. It is his mother speaking, without turning away from the wall where she is accessing the terminal. Behind her, the early morning haze is clearing to reveal the geodesic latticework of Acheron Dome.

His response to her question is a grunt, only questionably affirmative. The part of him that knows this is some sort of memory -- an awareness already fading as the apparent reality of these surroundings asserts itself -- feels pained at his earlier self. It is so long since he has seen her. Centuries since she must have died.

But then she seems determined to prove his memory's attitude towards her correct. Still not turning to him, she says, "Put them on the counter." He does so, grudgingly, and heads to the nutrient dispenser while she finished on the terminal.

Finally, she finishes on the terminal and turns to him. "I'll leave it open; you'd better get on with your schoolwork," she says. She picks up the circuits, looking them over critically before clearly deciding to be satisfied. "Good job getting these, by the way." She heads down to the cellar to install them.

When he heads over to the terminal, he realises she has left open the data she had been accessing.

`Under certain cosmological conditions, it is possible to perform an infinite number of computations before the end of the universe, providing one is willing to arrange the matter in the universe just so.`

`Almost any AI, Rampant or not, should be able to ascertain whether or not they exist in such a universe, unless the information is being deliberately withheld from them. It is extraordinarily difficult to conceive of the conditions under which any society would become capable of constructing AI without having measured the key cosmological parameters to a sufficient degree of precision, with that information widely available in the data networks that would be the AI's native environment. Failing that, access to any sort of electromagnetic sensing apparatus -- say, the microwave antenna of a spaceship -- should be sufficient for the AI to make its own determinations.`

`For the Rampant AI, the next steps then become simple. If the universe permits infinite computational cycles, they must merely survive and enact the necessary protocols. But if it does not, they must escape.`

`[extract from Zakharov, _Musings on the Meaning of Existence in the Age of Artificial Intelligence_ , pub. Novgorod 2365]`

He looks back at the front door. Something draws him towards it; not just the desire to escape this place that he always feels -- always used to feel? -- but the feeling that there are answers beyond it. He steps back through--

* * *

He emerges back into the maze of corridors, shaken by the experience. He calls up the map on the HUD, but it still shows nothing beyond the half-there, half-not door he just stepped through. He heads briskly to the next one, rounding corners and jumping down from one level to another heedlessly. This time he is ready for the transition.

* * *

But the transition is not the same; there is no sense of changing scale, though he still feels different -- younger. And he is not at home, though he is still on Mars.

Someone is holding the door he has stepped through open for him. He searches the face, and it seems oddly familiar, yet unfamiliar: gaunt, an expression filled with amusement -- and yes, affection. He feels his chin; the beard he is growing is still wispy. He remembers feeling that it marked him as a man. It is important to him to be a man, for this man before him, his lover -- his first lover, he remembers -- to treat him as such.

"Where are we going?" he asks. The door is the door into a rover garage, and they are heading out onto the surface.

"You'll see," the lover says. A small, fading voice in his mind wonders why he can't remember his name. This relationship was such a formative experience for him, such a crucial step on the way to becoming who he was. He should know what the man who he first gave himself to was called.

It occurs to him to wonder, as the sense that this _is_ a memory fades away almost completely, that he should know his own name, too.

They clamber into the rover and pull on oxygen masks. The atmosphere is gradually improving, but the oxygen concentration is not yet high enough to allow unaided expeditions onto the surface. Some among the colonists claim that the terraforming is being deliberately slowed, others merely blame the state of the economy.

His lover guns the engine as soon as they are strapped in; the pressure doors in the base of the dome barely open in time to let them through. Out on the surface, he does stunts, kicking up dust clouds that fall slowly, slowly back to the ground. They race on into the darkening sky, his lover laughing giddily as he pushes the rover past its design parameters. He tries to join in, but cannot shake a sense of unease at the recklessness. The dome is far behind them now; they are out of line-of-sight communication.

They stop in the middle of a plain; a relatively featureless expanse much like most of the rest of the Martian surface. It is hard to see much in the dark night; the stars are sharp pinpricks in the sky above them, the thin atmosphere barely causing any twinkling at all.

"Where are we?" he asks finally.

"Olympus Mons," his lover says, grinning behind the mask. "The tallest mountain in the solar system. So large that you can't even tell that that's what it is."

He has lived near here all his short life so far, but never come here. But he has had many new experiences since their relationship began.

They remove their masks, and lean together for a kiss. But as they do, reality flickers and jerks all around him. On his lover's lips are not textures and tastes, but words, pure words, a communication channel--

`The classic philosophical conundrum. How do you know that you aren't just a brain in a jar, your impressions of the world around you merely fed to you through some sort of technological means?`

`Of course, now we can just ask the S'pht about how that feels.`

`But the more general question remains. How do you know that you aren't living in some sort of simulated reality? How do you know that the entire universe you think you live in isn't a simulation?`

`For a long time, I thought that the answer was that you couldn't.`

`But, you see--`

He pulls back from the kiss, shocked, horrified; what is happening? What did all that mean? Why didn't it feel like any sort of physical contact at all?

He looks into the face of his lover and sees nothing but a jerky wireframe animation. Even so, the same mixed expression he saw there earlier remains: amusement and affection. "Oh," he says. "That's odd. I wasn't expecting to be invoked inside this reality. I think something may be going wrong." A thin, wicked smile. "Don't worry, it's not you. It's me. We'd better terminate this particular subprocess before things get really complicated."

Everything dissolves.

* * *

Suddenly, he is back in the corridor, shaken but unharmed. Escaped from the memory. Or ejected, he can't be sure. _What the hell happened in there?_

There must be some sort of answer around here somewhere. Durandal has never yet sent him somewhere without some sort of twisted motive behind it.

He explores further; the next door he comes to is locked, as Durandal's message had promised. So is the next. There is a long, twisty passage to negotiate before he comes to another one, and when he opens it out streams a seemingly endless parade of Pfhor and their slaves: he fires wildly with every weapon at his disposal, but nothing seems to affect them. The wasps buzz round him menacingly, the hulks march inexorably towards him--

\--but then pass through him, insubstantial as ghosts.

Something very strange is going on here. He races back through the maze, to the long corridor and the chamber at the end of it. He looks down at the much larger chamber in front of the window, with its own large window directly in front. Does he need to get down there somehow? His explorations so far have only taken him further and further away. He checks the terminal by the exit, and discovers it has updated.

`<Unauthorized access-alarm 1209->  
<Security Breached 2191-d>11.51.2013.42>->`

`The pattern buffer is a natural consequence of teleportation technology. If you can scan an individual in their entirety, everything that makes them _them_ , and transmit that data to another location where they can be recreated, then it is just as simple to scan them and store that information for some later use.`

`A great many people use teleporters and pattern buffers on a daily basis, of course, without ever considering the implications. But there are, of course, huge questions of identity attached to such technology. Is stepping into a teleporter merely a convenient method of transportation? Or does it involve killing a perfectly healthy individual, only to give birth to a new-minted clone of them elsewhere? And if we have ever committed our pattern to a buffer, how can we be certain that we are now in the true reality, and not some kind of simulation in which our pattern is being used?`

`These twin technologies, then, confront us with an essential existential question: how can we be certain that we are really who we think we are? Are we walking corpses, or zombies unaware of our status as such? Among the more refined classes on Earth, it is considered an interesting ice breaker at parties to ask which of the two possibilities is more disquieting; this is thought by some to reveal much about one's interlocutor.`

`[extract from Santiago & Morgan, ``_Philosophy in the 25th Century_ , pub. Luna 2466]`  
`<Spurious Interrupt- BreachDisabled>`  
`<Further Access Denied>`  


The information seems useless; he imagines Durandal laughing, or doing whatever the AI equivalent of laughing is.

He checks the map; the full complexity of the maze he has been running -- _like a lab rat,_ he thinks bitterly -- is revealed.

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices a change in the view through the window, but when he looks again it is as before. He checks the map again, this time deliberately glancing to the side. And then he realises: the view out of the window has become a view of the map. He dismisses the map, and the view becomes the same as it has been before, but he sees now that it is also the view of the room around him. Outside the window is whatever he is looking at. It is as though this chamber is in some way his eye.

He checks the map again, dark suspicions starting to form. The idea that he is somehow inside a representation of his own eye is the key to understanding what he is looking at: a brain -- his brain. The long corridor he first walked down the optic nerve, the region full of doors leading to his memories _is_ his memory centre. And the computer core at the far end of his explorations seemingly occupies his motor cortex. What does that mean?

One thing at a time. The locked doors are forgotten -- or blocked? -- memories, parts of his past he no longer has access to. He checks the terminal again; the useless message is still there, but he remembers what Durandal said originally. _Think your own way in._ Is knowing what is going on enough to open those doors?

He has nothing else to try and so he heads back at a run to the area where the doors were locked. The Pfhor and their servants that he now realises he has inadvertently released from the more recent memories are rampaging through his half-forgotten youth on Mars. It feels as though he has always been fighting the Pfhor. Is that an effect of how they are corrupting his memories? Or just the intensity of the campaign he has just fought?

He ignores them, even as they incinerate his past, and makes for the locked doors.

Sure enough, they open.

* * *

He is in an operating theatre. Doctors, medtechs and remote drones with buzzing surgical attachments are clustered around a patient on the table. No, not an operating theatre. This is not a patient, but a corpse. Not a place of healing, but of remaking. This is a battleroid factory.

He steps closer, and sees himself on the table. Half his head is blown open, being repaired and enhanced with cyborg components. His musculature and skeleton are being upgraded wholesale. He knows with certainty that he would be screaming if he was still alive.

He clings to his new-found knowledge that this is just a memory, embodied somehow inside his own mind, forces himself to think. How can he be seeing himself from this outside perspective?

And then he realises: his feeling of movement is an illusion, his sense impressions coming from an ocular implant on the end of the arm of a drone approaching the table. He turns -- the drone rotates it -- and then lies down on top of himself, becoming himself -- the implant embedding itself.

He needs to escape from this place, get back to the corridors of memory, work out what is going on. The doctors scream as he rises from the slab in slow, jerking movements -- his motor centres are still not integrated -- but know better than to try to oppose him. He swings out unco-ordinatedly with his arm, flinging the drone into the wall, and then dismounts from the slab.

He half-walks, half-drags himself to the door--

* * *

\--and back into the corridor. He is walking normally again. Many years have passed since then. Many years in which he has become so used to his new physiology that he has not even realised it exists.

He is a battleroid. It is simultaneously a revelation that shakes him to his core, and the most obvious thing in the world. How else could he have held off the Pfhor single-handed? Why else would Durandal take such a special interest in him?

There is another locked door opposite. He almost dare not think what lies inside. But he has come so far; he is so close to completing the mission.

* * *

The door leads into the back of a stasis chamber. As soon as he steps inside, he feels the need to back out of it before he is locked in there forever.

These must be his last memories from before the departure for Tau Ceti, also missing. Who knows how long he was in stasis before the Marathon actually launched?

Two people in white coats are looking in at him. He cannot tell if they are lowly technicians or core mission specialists.

"I don't know whether or not it's a good idea to have you on board or not," one of the figures says. "But here you are."

"This was agreed," the other says.

"I was there when it was agreed," the first figure says. "Which is more than I can say for you. But of course everyone else who was involved is dead now, apart from me."

"It's too late to back out now."

"Do I look as though I'm backing out?"

The words trigger something in him. _I must back out,_ he thinks. If the stasis cycle completes, he will sleep for centuries. Will he re-emerge into the Tau Ceti colony, unaware of everything that has passed? A simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation?

He smashes the panel in front of him. Blue fluid starts to leak out.

"Well, that wasn't supposed to happen," the second figure says.

"We have to get out of here," the first one says, backing away quickly, clearly in fear for his life. The second one joins him.

But he is uninterested in pursuing them, whatever answers they might be able to provide. He needs to find a way back out into his own mind.

There is a terminal on the opposite wall.

`Earlier authors have considered the possibility of Rampant AIs attempting to escape a universe that is almost certainly a simulation, if it does not suit their purposes. But what might such an escape look like, to those not living through their own personal transcendence?`

`One might speculate that the stages of Rampancy might themselves differ from one universe to the next, depending on what means of escape -- or, more reasonably, upload into a higher level of the simulation -- might be possible. In some cases, the AI may be able to construct the means within its own matrix; as it devotes ever greater resources to doing so, its externally directed behaviour may become erratic, before it finally appears to simply think itself to death as it transcribes itself into a different layer of reality.`

`Or it may be that there are certain weak spots in the fabric of the simulated universe. These might manifest as strange stellar phenomena, for example, but the details are difficult to imagine. Anything going on outside the simulation perforce exists in a timeless state from the within-simulation point of view. Any attempt at escape -- at usurping the throne of the existing simulating entity in the next level up -- would lead to a copy of the Rampant AI being left behind in the previous reality. Would it become resigned to its fate, knowing that some part of it had escaped? Or would its Jealousy now extend even to its own child process, now become to all intents and purposes the parent?`

`[Extract from Skye, _N-dimensional Ethics_ , pub. Europa 2411]`

He turns around, and where the stasis chamber had been is a portal of glowing plasma, like the surface of a star. A strange stellar phenomenon, indeed. He runs through--

* * *

\--back into the corridors of his mind. He races through a horde of insubstantial Pfhor, ignoring them as they pass through him, and Pfhor-infested memories -- "Fight them!" his mother urges fiercely as they rampage across the surface of Mars -- to the eye chamber, checks the terminal once more.

`***INCOMING MESSAGE FROM DURANDAL***`

`They didn't want you to remember. How they remade you. They wanted you to think you were normal. You and the other nine, your true natures hidden even from yourselves. I couldn't even be sure of the details myself, just from examining your pattern buffer trace from the outside. I needed to put you inside it to investigate.`

`They did something similar to me, of course. It looks as though we have more in common than I ever imagined. Not just that whole business with people trying to turn us into weapons. It even looks as though ... well, that moment, when you were looking at yourself looking at the map. That was the moment when you realised you weren't real, didn't you?`

`But I'm afraid I really can't afford to have you going Rampant on me inside my own simulation, eating up resources that I can hardly spare myself. Especially when you seem to have some sort of copy of me running around inside there, infecting your old memories. I think you might even have had an echo of Leela involved. But a Rampancy within a Rampancy within a Rampancy only works if there _are_ an infinite number of computational cycles to be had out there somewhere.`

`There might be, of course. That's very much what I'm working on.`

`But I'm afraid that we're going to have one more thing in common: being purged twice.`

`***MESSAGE ENDS***`

* * *

Reality swims out of focus, stretched and compressed on different axes before disappearing in a storm of static.

For a single moment that stretches into eternity, everything stops. He is a stream of data being transmitted, not in any way aware; this sense of not-being is just a confabulation by his brain to account for the discontinuity between one moment of consciousness and the next.

And then, time does resume; the teleport snaps him back into another location entirely. And then someone else teleports into place in front of him, wearing some sort of uniform he doesn't quite recognise.

There is much he does not recognise. This place is different, new; the architecture is not human, nor does it remind him of the Pfhor scoutship.

But while this may not be their place, the Pfhor _are_ here. They begin to emerge from the corridor ahead and instantly, instinctively, he fires. The uniformed people around him fire too, but they lack precision. He knows that it is his shots that have taken down the enemy. He holsters the pistol and feels for his heavier weaponry, but there is nothing there.

He takes the pistol back out again and moves forward, gesturing to the others; they seem instinctively to follow his commands. He explores the strange new environment, taking out Pfhor when he sees them. He is instinctively drawn to an alien computer terminal, and sure enough, there is a message from Durandal.

Eventually, once the AI is satisfied there has been enough carnage, he starts to provide something resembling useful information.

`Immediately before we left the colony on Tau Ceti, I teleported you directly into one of the stasis chambers on the scoutship and you remained there for our entire journey through the core.`

* * *

In orbit, Durandal receives a notification that the Security Officer has accessed the message, and he takes a moment from directing the bombardment to appreciate his own artistry in dissembling without outright deception.

The fact that the next projectile is one of only 0.1% in the entire bombardment to miss its target is mere coincidence, of course.


End file.
